Thursday, 18 July 2013

New App Lets You Boycott Monsanto And More By Scanning Your Shopping Cart

In her keynote speech at last year’s annual Netroots Nation
gathering, Darcy Burner pitched a seemingly simple idea to the thousands of
bloggers and web developers in the audience. The former Microsoft
programmer and congressional candidate proposed a smartphone app allowing
shoppers to swipe barcodes to check whether conservative billionaire
industrialists Charles and David Koch were behind a product on the shelves.

At the
time, Burner created a mock interface for her app, but that’s as far as she
got. She was waiting to find the right team to build out the back end, which
could be complicated given often murky corporate ownership structures.

She wasn’t aware that as she delivered her Netroots speech, a group of
developers was hard at work on Buycott, an even more sophisticated version of
the app she proposed.

“I remember reading Forbes’ story on the proposed app to help boycott Koch
Industries and wishing that we were ready to launch our product,” said
Buycott’s marketing director Maceo Martinez.

The app itself is the work of one Los Angeles-based 26-year-old
freelance programmer, Ivan Pardo, who has devoted the last 16 months to
Buycott. “It’s been completely bootstrapped up to this point,” he said.
Martinez and another friend have pitched in to promote the app.

Pardo’s handiwork is available for download on iPhone or Android, making
its debut in iTunes and Google. Play in early May. You can scan the barcode on
any product and the free app will trace its ownership all the way to its top
corporate parent company, including conglomerates like Koch Industries.

Once you’ve scanned an item, Buycott will show you its corporate family
tree on your phone screen. Scan a box of Splenda sweetener, for instance, and
you’ll see its parent, McNeil Nutritionals, is a subsidiary of Johnson &
Johnson.

Even
more impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to boycott business
practices that violate your principles rather than single companies. One of
these campaigns, Demand GMO Labeling,
will scan your box of cereal and tell you if it was made by one of the 36
corporations that donated more than $150,000 to oppose the mandatory labeling
of genetically modified food.

Deciding to add that campaign to your Buycott app might make buying your
breakfast nearly impossible, as that list includes not just headline grabbers like agricultural giant Monsanto but
just about every big consumer company with a presence in the supermarket aisle:
Coca-Cola, Nestle, Kraft, Heinz, Kellogg’s, Unilever and more

Buycott is still working on adding
new data to its back end and fine-tuning its information on corporate ownership
structures. Most companies in the current database actually own more brands
than Buycott has on record. The developers are asking shoppers to help improve
their technology by inputting names of products they scan that the app doesn’t
already recognize.

And if this all sounds worthy but depressing, be
assured that your next trip to the supermarket needn’t be all doom and gloom.
There are Buycott campaigns encouraging shoppers to support brands that have,
say, openly backed LGBT rights. You can scan a bottle of Absolut vodka or a bag
of Starbucks coffee beans and learn thatboth companies have come out for equal marriage.

“I don’t
want to push any single point of view with the app,” said Pardo. “For me, it
was critical to allow users to create campaigns because I don’t think it’s
Buycott’s role to tell people what to buy. We simply want to provide a platform
that empowers consumers to make well-informed purchasing decisions.”